Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/813

Rh MONTESQUIEU 783 travelling in Europe, Montesquieu not only satirized un mercifully the social, political, ecclesiastical, and literary follies of his day in France, but indulged in a great deal of the free writing (so free as very nearly to deserve the term licentious) which was characteristic of the tale-tellers of the time. But what scandalized grave and precise readers naturally attracted the majority, and the Lettres Persanes were very popular, passing, it is said, through four editions within the year, besides piracies. Then the vogue suddenly ceased, or at least editions ceased for nearly nine years to appear. It is said that a formal ministerial prohibition was the cause of this, and it is not improbable ; for, though the regent and Dubois must have enjoyed the book thoroughly, they were both shrewd enough to perceive that underneath its playful exterior there lay a spirit of very inconvenient criticism of abuses in church and state. The fact is that the Lettres Persanes is the first book of what is called the Philosophe movement. The criticism is scarcely yet aggressive, much less destructive, and in Montesquieu s hands it never became so ; but what it might become in the hands of others was obvious enough. It is this pre- cursorship in his own special line which in all probability made Voltaire so jealous of Montesquieu, as well as the advantage which a wealthy and well-born noble of high official position had over himself. It is amusing to find Voltaire describing the Lettres as a &quot; trumpery book,&quot; a &quot; book which anybody might have written easily.&quot; It is not certain that, in its peculiar mixture of light badinage with not merely serious purpose but gentlemanlike modera tion, Voltaire could have written it himself, and it is certain that no one else at that time could. The reputa tion acquired by this book brought Montesquieu much into the literary society of the capital, and he composed for, or at any rate contributed to, one of the coteries of the day the clever but rather rhetorical Dialogue de /Si/lla et d Eucrate, in which the dictator gives an apology for his conduct. For Mademoiselle de Clermont, a lady of royal blood, a great beauty and a favourite queen of society, he wrote the curious prose poem of the Temple de Guide. This is half a narrative, half an allegory, in the semi-classical or rather pseudo-classical taste of the time, decidedly frivolous and dubiously moral, but of no small elegance in its peculiar style. A later jeu d esprit of the same kind, which is almost but not quite certainly Montesquieu s, is the Voyage a Paphos, in which his warmest admirers have found little to praise. In 1725 Montesquieu was elected a member of the Academy, but an almost obsolete rule requiring residence in Paris was appealed to, and the election was annulled. It is doubtful whether a hankering after Parisian society, or an ambition to belong to the Academy, or a desire to devote himself to literary pursuits of greater importance, or simple weariness of not wholly congenial work determined him to give up his Bordeaux office ; it is certain that he continued to hold it but a short time after this. It is tolerably clear that he had already begun his great work, and the character of some papers which*, about this time, he read at the Bor deaux Academy is graver and less purely curious than his earlier contributions. In 1726 he sold the life tenure of his office, reserving the reversion for his son, and went to live in the capital, returning, however, for half of each year to La Brede. There was now no further formal obstacle to his reception in the Academic Frangaise, but a new one arose. Ill-wishers had brought the Lettres Persanes specially under the minister Fleury s attention, and Fleury, a precisian in many ways, was shocked by them. There are various accounts of the way in which the difficulty was got over, but all seem to agree that Montesquieu made concessions which were more effectual than dignified. He was elected and received in January 1728. Almost immediately after wards he started 011 a tour through Europe to observe men, things, and constitutions. He travelled through Austria to Hungary, but was unable to visit Turkey as he had proposed. Then he made for Italy, where he met Chesterfield. They sojourned together at Venice for some time, and a curious story is told of the way in which either a piece of mischief on Chesterfield s part, or Montesquieu s own nervousness and somewhat inordinate belief in his own importance, made the latter sacrifice his Venetian notes. At Venice, and elsewhere in Italy, he remained nearly a year, and then journeyed by way of Piedmont and the Rhine to England. Here he stayed for some eighteen months, and acquired an admiration for English character and polity which never afterwards deserted him. He returned, not to Paris, but to La Brede, and to outward appearance might have seemed to be settling down as a squire. He altered his park in the English fashion, made sedulous inquiries into his own genealogy, arranged an entail, asserted, though not harshly, his seignorial rights, kept poachers in awe, and so forth. Nor did he neglect his fortune, but, on the contrary, improved his estates in every way, though he met with much opposition, partly from the dislike of his tenants to new-fangled ways, and partly from the insane economic regulations of the time, which actually prohibited the planting of fresh vineyards. Although, however, Montesquieu was enough of a (/rand seigneur to be laughed at, and enough of a careful steward of his goods to be reviled for avarice, by those of his con temporaries who did not like him, these matters by no- means engrossed or even chiefly occupied his thoughts. In his great study at La Brede (a hall rather than a study, some 60 feet long by 40 wide) he was constantly dic tating, making abstracts, revising essays, and in other ways preparing his great book. Like some other men of letters, though perhaps no other has had the experience in quite the same degree, he found himself a little hampered by his earlier work. He may have thought it wise to soften the transition from the Lettres Persanes to the Esprit des Lois, by interposing a publication graver than the former and less elaborate than the latter. He had always, as indeed was the case with most Frenchmen of his century, been interested in ancient Rome and her history ; and he had composed not a few minor tractates on the subject, of which many titles and some examples remain, besides the already-mentioned dialogue on Sylla. All these now took form in the Considerations sur les Causes de la Grandeur et la Decadence des domains, which appeared in 1734 at Amsterdam, without the author s name. This, however, was perfectly well known ; indeed, Montesquieu formally presented a copy to the French Academy. Anony mity of title-pages was a fashion of the day which meant nothing. The book was not extraordinarily popular in France at the time. The author s reputation as a jester stuck to him, and the salons affected to consider the Lettres Persanes and the new book respectively as the &quot; grandeur r and the &quot;decadence de M. de Montesquieu;&quot; but more serious readers at once perceived its extraordinary merit, and it was eagerly read abroad. A copy of it exists or existed which had the singular fortune to be annotated by Frederick the Great, and to be abstracted from the Potsdam library by Napoleon. It is said, moreover, by competent authorities to have been the most enduringly popular and the most widely read of all its author s works in his own country, and it has certainly been the most frequently and carefully edited. Its merits are indeed undeniable. Merely scholastic criticism may of course object to it, as to every other book of the time, the absence of the exactness of modern critical inquiry into the facts of history ; but this is only a new example of a frequent ignoratio elenchi. The virtue of Montesquieu s book is not in its facts but in its views. It is (putting Bossuet and Vico aside) almost